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In Hidden Circles in the Web, scholar and Feminist Wiccan practitioner Constance Wise explores the growing and mysterious Pagan tradition of Feminist Wicca through the lens of process thought.
As one of the fastest growing Pagan traditions, Feminist Wicca appeals to many through its emphasis on the deep interconnectedness of life and its focus on the woman's religious experience. In Hidden Circles in the Web, scholar and practitioner Constance Wise explores Feminist Wicca through the lens of process thought, developing a new theaology of feminist spirituality that can enrich and deepen the religious practice. Although the twentieth-century philosophy of process thought is often portrayed as a complex and inaccessible system, Wise explains its concepts in simple language and illustrates her points with accessible examples from life. Wise invites readers into the hidden wisdom of Feminist Wicca and process thought, proposing statements of Feminist Wiccan beliefs and practices in six areas: history, anthropology, epistemology, ethics, cosmology, and theaology. While the focus of the book is on Feminist Wicca, her insights into process thought apply to an array of traditions and will interest a range of practitioners and scholars across the religious spectrum.
Creating Women's Theology engages women's questions: - Can women from different religious traditions engage one theological approach? - Can one philosophical approach support feminist religious thought? - What kind of belief follows women's criticism of traditional Christianity? Creating Women's Theology offers a portrait of how some women have found room for faith and feminism. For the last twenty-five years, women religion scholars have synthesized process philosophy with their feminist sensibilities and faith commitments to highlight the value of experience, the importance of freedom, and the interdependence of humanity, God, and all creation. Cutting across cultural and religious traditions, process relational feminist thought represents a theology that women have created. This volume offers an introduction to process and feminist theologies before presenting selections from canonical works in the field with study questions. This volume includes voices from Christianity, Judaism, goddess religion, the Black church, and indigenous religions. Creating Women's Theology invites new generations of undergraduate, seminary, and university graduate students to the methods and insights of process relational feminist theology.
Within the past twenty years, contemporary Pagan leaders, progressive Christian and Goddess theologians, advocates for queer and BDSM communities, and therapeutic bodyworkers have all begun to speak forcefully about the sacredness of the body and of touch. Many assert that the erotic is a divinely transformative force, both for personal development and for social change. Although "the erotic" includes sexuality, it is not limited to it; access to connected nonsexual touch is as profound a need as that for sexual freedom and health. In this book, Christine Hoff Kraemer brings together an academic background in religious studies and theology with lived experience as a professional bodyworker and contemporary Pagan practitioner. Arguing that the erotic is a powerful moral force that can ground a system of ethics, Kraemer integrates approaches from queer theology, therapeutic bodywork, and sexual minority advocacy into a contemporary Pagan religious framework. Addressing itself to liberal religious people of many faiths, Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective approaches the right to pleasure as a social justice issue and proposes a sacramental practice of mindful, consensual touch.
Covers the history of witchcraft from 1750 B.C.E. though the modern day. Includes a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography featuring cross-referenced entries on witch hunts, witchcraft trials, and related practices around the world.
Drawing on poststructuralist frameworks, this book examines the way to a radical acceptance of daily discontinuities and difference as it allows us to embrace life in the postmodern world. With each chapter exploring the human relationship with a disjunction in daily life, such as sleeping, forgetting, and multitasking, the author examines overlooked aspects of daily living as fresh data from which to analyze our condition. A phenomenological study of postmodern life, the book provides anecdotes of what it is like to live through these gaps and theorizes how we use these gaps. Using an arts-based methodology, the author also allows the work to mirror the discontinuities which it describes, interrupting the assumption of our lives as continuous and unitary in both form and content. Addressing the vast jumble of contradictions that is our daily experience in this contemporary world, it offers explanation through theory and anecdote and illustrates the path toward radical acceptance, which allows us to see ourselves as beautifully composed of fractures, gaps, and overflow. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students with interests in poststructuralism, curriculum theory, and art-based research methods.
A living relationship with the wild natural world is our birthright as human beings. But centuries of civilization, patriarchy, transcendental monotheism, reductionist science, and capitalism have broken the connection between humankind and nature. To be Neo-Pagan today is to reclaim our original relation with the world. It is nothing more and nothing less than to be fully human again. To (re-)learn what this means, we need to strip away the layers of estrangement that have accreted to our collective soul over the centuries. So we look back to our pagan ancestors. Though separated by time, there is a connection between us and them. We carry it in our flesh and blood. At our most fundamental, we are still the same human beings we were then. We can be pagan again today because we live under the same Sun and on the same Earth, we feel the same wind blowing through our hair and the same rain falling on our skin.
The World Parliament of Religions adopted the view that there will not be peace in this world without including peace among religions. Yet, even with the unified force of the world’s religions and wisdom traditions, this cannot be accomplished without justice among people. In one way or another, “unity” among religions, as based on justice and the will to accept the other’s religions and even irreligiosity as means of justice, will not prevail without an internal and external, spiritual, theological, philosophical and practical investigation into the very reasons for religious strife and fanaticism as well as the resources that people, cultures, religions and wisdom traditions might provide to disentangle them from the injustices of their host regimes, and to seek the “balance” that leads to a measure of universal fairness among the multiplicity of religious and non-religious expressions of humanity. “Conviviality” expresses the depth and breadth of “living together,” which itself can be understood as a translation of a central term of Whitehead's philosophy and the process tradition—“concrescence” (growing together, becoming concrete)—as it is recently and increasingly used in different discourses to name the concrete community of difference of individuals, cultures, and religions in appreciation of the mutual inclusiveness of their lives. This book seeks to bring together experts from different religious (and non-religious) traditions and spiritual persuasions to suggest ways in which the living wisdom traditions might contribute to, and transform themselves into, a universal conviviality among the people, cultures and religions of this world for a common future. It wishes to test the resources that we can contribute to this concurrent and urgent matter, aware of Whitehead's call for a radical transformation of power and violence in thought and action as, perhaps, the ultimate theory of conflict resolution.
A groundbreaking new theory of religion Religion remains an important influence in the world today, yet the social sciences are still not adequately equipped to understand and explain it. This book advances an innovative theory of religion that goes beyond the problematic theoretical paradigms of the past. Drawing on the philosophy of critical realism and personalist social theory, Christian Smith explores why humans are religious in the first place—uniquely so as a species—and offers an account of secularization and religious innovation and persistence that breaks the logjam in which religious scholarship has been stuck for so long. Certain to stimulate debate and inspire promising new avenues of scholarship, Religion features a wealth of illustrations and examples that help to make its concepts accessible to readers. This superbly written book brings sound theoretical thinking to a perennially thorny subject, and a new vitality and focus to its study.
As the first volume of a two-volume set on new media users in China, this book approaches the subject from a macro level by regarding users as constructive nodes within networks, thereby giving insights into the interaction between users and new media and among individuals within the ambit of new media. The author revisits the roles of the typical new media user that has changed from that of a passive "audience member" to a basic unit of the network itself, acting as both a node in the communication network, social network, and service network and also a link between the three. In viewing users as nodes functioning in communication networks and social networks, this volume unravels the new landscapes of communication of the new media era and the consequent profound changes in social relationships, interpersonal connection modes and different methods of interaction. In terms of their role in service networks resting upon the network economy, new media users not only are consumers with personalized needs, but also serve as service guides, resource contributors, and even major productive forces. This title will be a must-read for scholars, students and media professionals interested in the topics of internet communication, new media usage, and media and society as a whole.